Events

Friday, 18 October 2013

Seminario Dr Jaime Iranzo, IDIBAPS

Abstract:

Autoimmunity and tumor immunology are two instances of the immune response that challenge the classical paradigm according to which the immune system (IS) is founded on self-nonself recognition. However, both phenomena arise naturally if the probabilistic nature of the communication between the innate and the adaptive components of the IS is taken into account. This presentation will deal with the development of a novel theoretical framework able to capture some central features of the IS of vertebrates while remaining abstract enough to reveal general properties that would be shared by any plausible adaptive IS.

Biography:

Jaime Iranzo holds both a degree in Biology (Universidad de Navarra) and in Physics (UNED), and obtained a Master Degree in Mathematical Engineering at Universidad Carlos III. In year 2008 he got the Physics Special Prize of the Arquímedes Awards. He defended his PhD in June 2013, with a thesis on evolutionary biology supervised by Dr. Susanna Manrubia. At present, he is hired as a postdoc in the Group of Evolutionary Systems at Centro de Astrobiología (INTA-CSIC). Most of his theoretical research is based on empirical observations, among others the response of viral populations to antiviral therapies and the evolutionary dynamics of insertion sequences in the genome.